Everyone is talking about Virtual Reality. But what is Virtual Reality and what can it achieve now and in the future? And most importantly: is it worth all the buzz? Virtual Reality is as old as the gaming industry itself and already had flopped in the beginning of the 90s. But now a Luckey guy has reinvented Virtual Reality and the cards are being reshuffled.

2. Hamburg, 11th of September, 2015
Virtual Reality – Real Or Fantasy
malte@crazybunch.biz
@CrazyBunchTeam
Malte Schmidt

3. - What is Virtual Reality?
- What are the problems of VR?
- What are the opportunities of VR?
- Break A Brick and VR
- Conclusion
Table of Contents

4. What is Virtual Reality?

5. History
- Idea of Virtual Reality in 30‘s
- Virtual Reality totally flopped in the 90‘s
- In the era of smartphones a Luckey guy reinvented VR and the cards are now being reshuffled
- Matrix, Holodeck, Neuromancer, Ready Player One -> everyone knows what VR is
- VR is the ultimate escapist dream

6. Head Mounted Display
&
Input
(e.g. Motion Controller)
How does VR work these days?
- Head Tracking
- Positional Tracking
- Motion Tracking
- Lenses
- Stereoskopic View via
Display

7. Head-Mounted Displays

8. Oculus Rift

9. Sony Morpheus

10. HTC Vive

11. Samsung Gear VR

12. What are the problems of VR?

13. - Visual perception VS. vestibular system
- Causes dizziness, nausea and fatigue
- Prevent motion sickness in VR-applications:
- Latency
- Short play sessions
- Avoid unnatural movements like strafing or fast turning
- Haptic suits and haptic installations
- Use clever game design
Simulator- or motion sickness

14. - Avatar locomotion
- One of the biggest problems
- Controlling the avatar has to be reconsidered completely
- Classical Shooter controls won‘t work anymore (WASD and mouse) due to fast movements, strafing, turning and running backwards
- Body alignment and head alignment need to be controlled seperately. How to turn in VR?
- Game input
- Motion Controller
- Gamepad
- Motion Sensors (Leap Motion, Kinect, etc.)
- Treadmills (Virtualizer, Omni)
Locomotion and Input

15. Uncanny Valley

16. Uncanny Valley

17. Uncanny Valley

18. - Trade-off between game complexity and the amount of peripheral hardware needed
- Mass market accessibilty with less peripheral hardware
- HMDs and hardware should be affordable and comfortable to wear
- Only hardcore gamers are going to use a lot of additional hardware
- There are still many problems like the need of wired and heavy HMDs, expensive hardware and space
needed for motion tracking systems
Ergonomics and mass market accessibility

19. What are the opportunities of VR?

20. - The feeling of being there, to have physical presence in a virtual environment
Presence
- Michael Abrash‘s checklist
- Technical aspects like low latency, high
resolution, high refresh rate, rock solid
tracking, wide field of view etc.
- Plausible virtual worlds and plausible
virtual avatars
- Haptic feedback
- Audio
Immersive
Virtual Reality

21. - VR-Experiences:
- Situations you can only
experience in VR
- Situations you can experience in
VR without (physical)
repercussions
Why do we need presence?

22. - Gaming
- Social Interaction
- Business
- Training
- Education
- Visualization
- Psychological Treatment
- Many more
Vast field of use
Replacement of most
aspects of the real world
Development

23. - Everyone can be an expert
- Everyone can be a pioneer
- Whole new platform
- Content is needed to prove that consumer VR works
- Indie devs can create innovative content and gameplay which AAA studios can't
- Still a small market with great visibility
Opportunities for indie devs

24. - Started as a game jam in early 2014
- Originally planned to be a Flash game
- 2D action puzzle shooter
- Idea to make „Break A Brick“ VR
- Release on Samsung Gear VR
Break A Brick and VR

26. - Short play sessions
- Do not flood the user with difficult input
- Or weird movement, that can cause motion sickness
- Less motion means less motion sickness
- Expose the strenghts of VR and conceal it‘s (current) weaknesses
- ( use cute Bricks and a cat to make the game more accessible ;) )
What we did

27. Conclusion
- VR is still at its beginning
- Make games which are fun with the current hardware
- Minimize motion sickness and maximize presence
- Experiment and use different approaches for VR
- Consumer-VR needs an existence proof
- It‘s not going to flop like in the 90‘s
- VR is still partially fantasy and partially real

28. www.virtualweekend.com

29. That‘s it! Thank you!